Talking in the Library Series 2

Click on 'Watch now' for the programme you want, then, when you reach the Slate Player, drag your cursor across to the right till you find the archive line-up. Click anywhere on the line-up, then select the interview.

The Love of Unknown Women

Young women with damp hollows, downy arms,
Bare burnished legs — you see them striding
Towards their plant-filled offices, riding
Bicycles to flatshares after work; lunchtimes, you stare
As secretaries, backpackers tanned from birth
Peel off their things and stretch on sun-warmed earth.
A few of them stare back... As if they’d share
Their world of holidays and weekend farms

With you! They step more lightly every year,
A glimpse of neck-hair, a scent that lingers, girls
Who, swinging bags with shops’ names, disappear,
Trailing glances, into crowds; each one unfurls
Her special beauty like a fragile frond
Before your famished eyes. I am what lies beyond,
They seem to say, beyond the mortgage, car and wife —
I am what you deserve, I am the buried life

Rotisserie (The Wait)

i.m. Ian Hamilton, 1938-2001

‘There’s a feeling of disaster in the air, which I now know I have felt for a long time.’ — I.H., May 2001.

Our usual place, and everything in it
Exactly as we had learned to expect:
Most tables empty, the ‘interfered-with air’
Heavy with the stink of re-cooked fat
That got into the clothes, into the hair
Along with cigarettes smoked at such a rate
It was like a race, and you had to win it;

The ‘maitre d’, a supercilious queer
Who knew we had too much class to be there
(These nights, I have to keep going back
To meet you, though it’s still only me there)...
Breathless from the cold, my coat unchecked
I found our usual table, where I sat;
‘Some wine, sir?’ ‘No thanks’, I said, ‘I’ll wait.’

Orpheus

What is life to me without thee?

                                 Much the same,
except that I can’t hear the great aria
sung by Kathleen Ferrier
and not be filled with longing and with shame,
so uncannily her portrait on the CD cover
resembles you; so uncannily her 1950s perm
brings you back to me, that first day of term,
waving me on to school. I missed you like a lover
and would have clawed through concrete and earth
to be at home with you, who had to let me go,
who gave me such a sense of my own worth
that I sing with her, as if Orpheus was my name...

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